Abigail's Party

Arlette, Cara Benedetto, Eva Dixon, Phillip Gabriel, Ian Gatewood, Eva Gold, Shamiran Istifan, Parker Ito, Cary Kwok, Louis Morlæ, Amanda Moström, Jack O'Brien, Beatriz Olabarietta, Magali Reus, Tasneem Sarkez, Lara Shahnavaz, Andrew Sim, Mary Stephenson, Łukasz Stokłosa

The end of the year is impossible to look away from. Supermarkets trot out short-lived seasonal flavours; everything is draped in fairy lights, and gaudy baubles; in the red and white that’s become a shorthand for the season. The uniform of countless, mulled-wine scented parties, hotbeds of the best kinds of bad decisions, is a jumper of visual abundance: bright colours, jagged stripes, gleaming snowflakes. It does more than just draw the eye; so overwhelming that the gaze is given nowhere to rest. It sears into some part of the brain that craves these images, a place to hide away from the unforgiving cold waiting just beyond the threshold.

Camp is, at its core, unnatural, an act of refusal. It’s more than just bright colours that scream for attention, or a diva’s permanently arched eyebrow. It’s the endless flickering of neon signs that light up stretches of otherwise barren deserts: a promise of shelter and paradise within those gilded gates. It’s the tightness of a leopard-print dress that isn’t just tight, but too- tight. It wears the body as much as the body wears it, leaving nothing to the imagination and everything to the eye that refuses to look away. Whoever is able to wear this dress, to serve it, knows exactly what they’re doing. They want to be looked at just as much as someone wants to look at them; ensuring that it’s not just tight but too-tight, not just short but too-short. It looks back as parody of seduction, a pantomime wink. Keep looking at me, and you won’t need to think about anything else. Keep your gaze fixed on the tightness of that leopard-print dress, imagine how you would feel to see it hitched up another inch. Why bother looking at something dark, dreary, or depress- ing when pure, abundant pleasure beckons you closer? Why watch an austere, militaristic Ian McKellen as Richard III when Laurence Olivier, in elaborate gowns and a shimmering crown, mugging at the camera because he never stopped acting for the back rows of the national theatre, is right there? Ian’s Dick is too familiar, too real with his black uniform and iron fist.

Three men, all of them a little bit queer, are standing around an immaculately decorated drawing room; there are tchotchkes and hardcover tomes, vases full of flowers, paintings adorning the walls. The three men adore one painting in particular, newly finished. Each looks from it to each other as if craving that post-coital cigarette. It’s more seductive than anything that’s ever come from paintbrush and easel: a libertine in repose, in his prime. But the portrait will not stay that way forever: it will distort and decay with time; its layers of visual splendour and fin-de-siécle twinkdom always threatening to peel back, revealing one truly unbearable thing; the thing the painter – who pines for the twink, because of course he does – and all who came before and after him, in their gaudy jumpers and too-tight-leopard print dresses, fear the most: the world as it is. But as long as you keep looking at the painting, it will never change; as brilliant, beautiful, and untouchable as everything around it could never dream of being.